Hey yall! I recently got a chance to sculpt in ZBrush so I'm currently exporting models from Maya to later on sculpt them in ZBrush. On the left is the model in Maya with a wireframe and on the right is the subdivided model in ZBrush with around 3.3 million points. Why are the normals so horribly hard? I have deliberately…
Moonshank has the right of it. You'lll have to import the model with control edges if you want it to subdivide nicely in ZBrush. Another option you COULD try it so subdivide it once with smoothing off, then turn it ON and subd a few more times. That doesn't give ideal results but ... might be usable.
You need to add supporting edges where you want hard edges etc. similar to subdivisional modelling in any other 3d application. You can add these supporting edges in your 3d app or in Zbrush. OR you can manually go in and smooth out hard edges using the smooth brush. edit, oh man, gang-ninjad!
You've a few options You could use crease in maya for the hard edges before bringing it in to zbrush, think you need to use zapplink for that. You could bevel the edges in maya and reproject to get a consistent mesh Store a morph target at level 0, smooth it a couple of times, drop back to level 0 and restore morph target.
I think the reason your getting that is because you have unchecked the "smt" option. I'm going to take a guess, the distortion that your talking about is because you haven't made this object with the smoothing on in maya. Press the "3" key while in maya and it will show you a sub divided example of your model, form there…
add an edge loop (or however many you need) in maya near to the edge in desired location. Look up hard surface modelling techniques as someone already said there are fundamental techniques for sub d modelling. If your looking to bake things your going to want a bit of a round edge anyway. you will be able to see what it…